In the the 21st Century the web went shopping. The search engines of Google and Bing increasingly are bringing us results which are oriented to the most popular, the most shop-able and most typical search links. Want to buy something? Want to know what your friends are recommending? Just ask Google. And the results are fast, fast, fast. And increasingly dumb. Want to buy something? Great, we can get it for you. But what if you want to know about something? Wikipedia is great of course for getting the conventional explanation. And of course for philosophical reading we have the Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. There are other ways to search the Web, InstraGrok attempts to do semantic analysis of information on the web. Traditional “big data: search engines like Google and Bing attempt to measure web activity (which Google calls signals) in order to delivery search results of what’s hot and what everyone else references. InstraGrok attempts to group web information about a search topic into clusters of semantically related groups. Here is the search results from Google for “Carl Jung”:

Here is the initial results from InstraGrok for the same search:

Here the results for Jung are graphed into groups: Carl Jung in the center and a series of related concepts associated with Carl Jung, psyche, consciousness, alchemy, etc. The ugly ad on the right pay$ for instaGrok. If we click on the “More…” tab on the left we see a display like the following for whatever circle we have selected:

Now lets move around a little bit on the graph and select the alchemy grouping

And expand the “More…” tab on this grouping:

Finally lets open the Journal Tab and reveal the cloud notes which we can store with the search. Nice.